This invention relates to a machine translation method and source/target text display method.
With recent progress in machine translation technology, machine translation has been effectively used. Recently, in addition to machine translation on source text input from a keyboard, floppy disk or optical reader into a computer, an opportunity of machine translation for text obtained through a network has been increased. Particularly because the Internet provides ample information written in various languages, generally internet browsers provided with translation functions have been utilized by the public.
When a result of machine translation of foreign text obtained from Internet is displayed, in many cases, a result of translation is displayed using an existing Internet browser.
However, originally the Internet browsers were not designed to display translation results, but to display a single language text. Thus, when it is necessary to display both a source text and its target text, some devices have been taken.
For example, two Internet browsers are activated on a computer at the same time and a source text is displayed by one browser while its target text is displayed by the other browser. However, according to this method, the browser for displaying the source text and the other browser for displaying the target text are activated completely independently. Thus automatic display of a target text browser (or source text browser) corresponding to a part displayed in the source browser (or target text browser) could not be realized. That is, according to this method, because corresponding parts of the source text and target text are displayed in each browser at the same time, scrolling of the source text and the target text must be carried out independently, so that the operation for this procedure becomes complicated, which is a problem of conventional methods.
According to another method in the source text and target text are mixedly displayed in a single browser. According to this method, for example, a target text is displayed just after its source text and further a next paragraph and its translated text are displayed. That is, some unit of the source text and corresponding translated text are displayed so that a correspondence therebetween can be recognized easily. However, according to this method, an amount of text to be displayed in a single screen almost doubles. Further, because the source text and its target text are displayed alternately, an entire stream of the original text cannot be grasped easily. Further, scrolling of the source text and its target text cannot be carried out independently, which is another problem.
The above problems also exist in a case in which the source text input from the keyboard, floppy disk or optical reader into the computer is machine-translated and displayed on a display unit.